A United States judge has blocked the administration of US President Donald Trump from deporting unaccompanied Guatemalan children for at least the next two weeks, in the government’s ongoing hardline anti-immigration push.
The order, which was issued on Sunday in response to a complaint filed by a pro-immigrant advocacy group, came as some Guatemalan children were reportedly already put onto planes at a Texas airport and huddled inside.
District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s emergency decree followed a petition from the National Immigration Law Center in relation to 10 children aged between 10 and 17.
After initially preventing the deportation of the group, Sooknanan, who is based in Washington, DC, widened the order to include all Guatemalan children who had reached the US without a parent or guardian.
Sooknanan also brought forward a hearing about the issue on Sunday due to reports that some of the children were in the process of being removed from the US during the country’s Labor Day holiday weekend.
“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” the judge said on Sunday, noting that her decision applied broadly to unaccompanied Guatemalan minors.
The flurry of legal activity came days after reports in the US media that the Trump administration was preparing to start child deportations to Guatemala this weekend, following an agreement with the Central American country.
Such a move would constitute a “clear violation of the unambiguous protections that Congress has provided them as vulnerable children”, according to the National Immigration Law Center’s legal challenge.
Although the children should be under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the US government was set on “illegally transferring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture”, the complaint added.
On Friday, Guatemala’s Foreign Minister Carlos Martinez confirmed that his country was willing to receive hundreds of children who were in the US.
Since the start of his second presidential term in January, Trump has attempted to start deporting refugees and immigrants en masse.
His administration’s anti-immigration actions, which have included sending hundreds of people to a notorious prison in El Salvador, have been beset by legal difficulties.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the most high-profile face of the Trump administration’s crackdown and a Salvadoran man legally residing in the US state of Maryland, was mistakenly deported in March. He was severely beaten and subjected to psychological torture in prison there, his lawyers say.
Abrego Garcia now wishes to seek asylum in the US. His lawyers told a judge in recent days that he fears further persecution and torture should the Trump administration succeed in deporting him to Uganda, as it plans to do.
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